Google announced the participating Open Source Projects this Monday. Following that, students are encouraged to select projects they are interested in and submit their work proposals from March 24 to 31. Among the participating projects are: Debian, DragonFly BSD, ES operating system, FreeBSD, Gentoo, GNU Hurd, Haiku, Linux, NetBSD, and openSuse. Overall, projects range from kernel hacking to web applications. Last year, 900 students were accepted, with Google paying them and their mentoring projects up to USD 4.5 Million.

Really good to see the Gnumeric spreadsheet as one of the accepted groups.

One of their proposed ideas is "Multi-Dimensional data visualisation" (as in Excel's pivot-tables). I *really* hope that idea is accepted! Pivot-tables are about the only major thing that Excel has and Gnumeric doesn't. Once they are in Gnumeric, that'll make Gnumeric an even better option for companies wanting to stop paying the annual MS "tax" (license fees).

I've always preferred Gnumeric. Not because it had more features or because it has amazing excel import support (it doesn't on both counts), but because it started up really fast and did everything I've needed to use a spreadsheet for in a quick and intutive manner.

Are there all kinds of advanced statistical and mathematical operations not supported by Gnumeric? Probably, but I do all my non-trivial stuff in MATLAB, so I've never run into any of them.

So the question as to whether it's better than calc or not comes down entirely to what you're using your spreadsheets for.

* Drawing graphs / visualization of data is much better
* Import is much more sophisticated, letting me import
numbers like 1.235e-2, where OO Calc just failed
* Gnumeric is known for its really great numerical
stability
* Gnumeric has a more intuitive and responsive user
interface

I would not recommend anyone to switch from Excel to OO Calc, but to Gnumeric would be fine for most people.

UPDATE: Btw, in a response to the post above, I had some statistical needs in Gnumeric and found what I needed, except a "round to X valid digits" function, which I also missed in OO Calc and guess is not available in Excel, too? .. Typical statistic tasks like ranking by value, standard deviation of a population, etc. are supported, also some regression stuff.... you can look it up on the web and compare to your/your users' needs.